One fact of my experience which the reader may, find interesting is that when I am writing steadily I have little relish for reading.  I fancy, that reading is not merely a pastime when it is apparently the merest pastime, but that a certain measure of mind-stuff is used up in it, and that if you are using up all the mind stuff you have, much or little, in some other way, you do not read because you have not the mind-stuff for it.  At any rate it is in this sort only that I can account for my failure to read a great deal during four years of the amplest quiet that I spent in the country at Belmont, whither we removed from Cambridge.  I had promised myself that in this quiet, now that I had given up reviewing, and wrote little or nothing in the magazine but my stories, I should again read purely for the pleasure of it, as I had in the early days before the critical purpose had qualified it with a bitter alloy.  But I found that not being forced to read a number of books each month, so that I might write about them, I did not read at all, comparatively speaking.  To be sure I dawdled over a great many books that I had read before, and a number of memoirs and biographies, but I had no intense pleasure from reading in that time, and have no passions to record of it.  It may have been a period when no new thing happened in literature deeply to stir one’s interest; I only state the fact concerning myself, and suggest the most plausible theory I can think of.

I wish also to note another incident, which may or may not have its psychological value.  An important event of these years was a long sickness which kept me helpless some seven or eight weeks, when I was forced to read in order to pass the intolerable time.  But in this misery I found that I could not read anything of a dramatic cast, whether in the form of plays or of novels.  The mere sight of the printed page, broken up in dialogue, was anguish.  Yet it was not the excitement of the fiction that I dreaded, for I consumed great numbers of narratives of travel, and was not in the least troubled by hairbreadth escapes, or shipwrecks, or perils from wild beasts or deadly serpents; it was the dramatic effect contrived by the playwright or novelist, and worked up to in the speech of his characters that I could not bear.  I found a like impossible stress from the Sunday newspaper which a mistaken friend sent in to me, and which with its scare-headings, and artfully wrought sensations, had the effect of fiction, as in fact it largely was.

At the end of four years we went abroad again, and travel took away the appetite for reading as completely as writing did.  I recall nothing read in that year in Europe which moved me, and I think I read very little, except the local histories of the Tuscan cities which I afterwards wrote of.

XXXIV.  VALDES, GALDOS, VERGA, ZOLA, TROLLOPE, HARDY